Of course, the real question is "Why is evolution so hard to understand?"

Evolution is hard to understand because the tyranny of words is such that the more exacting words we use become in their differentiation even more restricting when we attempt to integrate them into the orderings of an objective reality.

Aha. I thought so. A basic misunderstanding of the nature of Reality (an almost foregone conclusion, given our imperfect perception of it and our replacement of it by that crude approximation we call reality) leads us to misinterpret all around us. For example, in Reality there is no such thing as species. It is as though we had taken a two dimensional slice of a tree and decided that all the separate and apparently discrete things we call twigs and branches were independent entities. Thank you, jenny jenny, for opening my eyes.

Ahso, Faldo, It is strange that you have known these fine things for so long and have not yet become a better person. But no matter, today is the first day of your life. Come, let us reconstruct the world together.

3,500,000,000 BC: Self-replicating lieforms first appear on Earth. Mindless, dumb things (cynobacteria) they non-the-less were able to build reef-like structures to keep the oceanic tides from washing themselves out to sea. Unmolested for three billion years they built the oxygenated atmosphere which we so much enjoy today.

[Thanks for not waiting, I'm back.]

550,000,000 BC: O'happy day!

After some three billion years of off-and-on frozen seas, mobile, sexual, and happy pre-vertebrate animals, sat, swam, and crawled about in the warm waters. And then...

380,000,000 BC: the animals followed the plants onto the dry lands and crawled about. But not fast enough. Plants and pre-trees flourshed in the heat and high CO2 atmosphere. But when they died there were too few bugs to eat them. The stupid trees could then not return their carbon to the atmosphere. Their remains instead were buried as coal, or, as we like to say today, sequestered as carbon. Atmospheric CO2 levels dropped sharply as the Earth cooled initiating an early cycle of Ice ages.To this let all of us give thanks,(), all we free-thinking people.

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